5 ms·

It is exponentially harder to contain the virus on continent with hundreds of millions of people with dozens of countries than to contain it on islands with one

by empiko 6y ago

It is exponentially harder to contain the virus on continent with hundreds of millions of people with dozens of countries than to contain it on islands with one centralized government. It is not only Europe and USA, but also India, South America, Middle East, Russia, etc that fail at it for the same reason. The only continental country that managed to control the virus is China, but they can do it mainly because they have no problem banning immigration (which is not feasible for EU countries for example) and because they can use the centralized government to make decisions that would not fly elsewhere. Effectively, China can function as a really big island.

Traster 6y ago
The article does a terrible job at addressing nuance. Take Australia - a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m, and Europe - a continent the size of Australia with a population of 750m. Clearly we can compare these like for like and whine about "culture".
- viraptor 6y ago
  And yet more nuance - the density of major cities in both Europe and Australia are reasonably comparable, so concentrating on those rather than towns / rural / empty areas does provide some information. Sure, the environment will be slightly different and local travel changes things. But most Londoners and most Melbournians don't move that much. (Try to invite someone to zone 5) They'll have mostly-local interactions and similar social activity circles.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  Australia was setup for this kind of incident either way with strict quarantine rules for decades on natural goods & animals brought into the country. The local wildlife had suffered from invasive species. It was not a hard act to shut it all down. The structure of the schengen area and the differing population densities is an entirely different beast, I agree.
- cam_l 6y ago
  >a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m You must not have spent much time here. Most Australians live in a narrow band stretched along the south east coast. Victoria, which has just come out of a 4 month lockdown, has nearly 7m residents in about 240 thousand sq km. Slightly smaller, but on par with Sweden. Like Sweden, two thirds of the state is virtually empty. Though in Victoria, we have a much more dense urban centre. The rest of Australia is similar, very small, dense urban centre with vast tracks of unoccupied land. Yes, we can compare these if we are careful about the similarities and differences. Our populated areas have similar densities as various population centres across Europe. Our cities have been cut off from regional areas, and our states closed off from each other, which seems like maybe a bigger deal than if European states closed off from each other. Maybe nuance is hard when you have a point to make.
  - Traster 6y ago
    Yes, most of the 25m in Australia live in areas with similar densities as some parts of Europe, that still doesn't mean they're surrounded by several hundred million other people. The problem doesn't scale linearly, policing 750m people isn't like policing 25m people, especially when the 750m have a propensity to all shuffle around a bit, and live in 50 different jurisdictions. My point is that the author isn't careful about the similarities and differences, the author just puts everything down to policy decisions and points of discourse that simply aren't the case in most of the places the author is describing.
    - cam_l 6y ago
      >that simply aren't the case Well, that's the problem with nuance isn't it? If you argue the bigger picture, the facts get in the way. If you argue the minutiae if facts, there is always another scope which renders those facts questionable. As I read it, the article made no comparison of anything with respect to AU/NZ, except that these are other western countries with very different policy decisions. Which is quite careful, and benign, in terms of a comparison to make. If you take the example of Sweden from before, Sweden's border with Norway is about the same length as the border between NSW and VIC, about the same number of people either side, communicable languages, (prob also about the same level of derision from those on either side), a few major airports, a couple of difficult roads out, and the rest is by sea. Though they are closer to more populous areas, we also have a couple of billion people to our north, almost a third of the state are originally from overseas, more than half of them from Asia. There was definitely pressure here to stay open. The majority of Sweden's immigration by comparison is from Middle East. So if you look at policy decisions, in comparison, there is not much reason they were not capable of locking off their borders if they chose, both operationally, and in terms of pressure. In the case of the virus, though failure modes are indeed exponential, success modes seem they might be closer to linear. You raised the 'does not scale' argument, but also tried to say the article lacked nuance. I was just pointing out (though I may not disagree in aggregate), I very much reject the premise of 'does not scale' when trying to deny comparisons. I argue that the article did not lack a nuance which it needed, but point out that your response did, in fact, lack nuance where nuance was needed. 'Does not scale' is a tired argument, and rarely stands to scrutiny. Comparisons are never perfect, but they are all about nuance, where do they work and where do they fail?
makomk 6y ago
China's success is weird. Almost none of what they're doing should work. For example, according to their totally-not-propaganda publication describing how they controlled coronavirus, the foundation is public temperature screening - it's that which feeds potential cases into testing and later contact tracing - and that just fundamentally doesn't work. The false positive and negative rates are atrocious, especially if you do it with forehead thermometers and thermal cameras like they do. They also do big, high-profile testings of entire cities which don't seem to find anything, making them useless. Meanwhile, there kept on being incidents like someone admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms in the main city of the region where the big outbreak was known to be at the time not getting tested for coronavirus and spreading it in the hospital. Or China completely missing an outbreak until it happened to spread to the better-tested and better-protected Beijing. There are some things they do that should have some effect, like treating everyone from Wuhan like a plague carrier very early on in the outbreak (bit late to replicate that now, and China and the WHO loudly campaigned to make sure other countries didn't anyway) and quarantine for people returning to the country. We know from New Zealand though that even dedicated quarantine hotels are too leaky to really work at China scale - and there's also the problem of their extremely long land borders.
- dukoid 6y ago
  It's nearly free and should enable detecting and tracing emerging clusters before they become a bigger problem.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Or China is lying. It's hard to verify the numbers they publish.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I'd find it surprising that they hide really big numbers. They probably lower things but it's not high enough to make people want to leak pictures of dead bodies or weird trucks carrying boxes. Or maybe they're really good at hiding their operations..
square_usual 6y ago
> The only continental country that managed to control the virus is China Just off the top of my head, South Korea, Vietnam and Uruguay are "continental" countries that held back COVID really, really well.
- oefrha 6y ago
  South Korea is a peninsula country, and an island for all intents and purposes considering no one, other than the occasional defector, crosses their only land border (with North Korea). Other examples, sure. There are more, too.
  - fidelramos 6y ago
    Spain is a peninsula country, yet the COVID-19 situation is among the worst in the world.
    - oefrha 6y ago
      Being a peninsula country gives you an advantage (relatively fewer border towns to worry about), it doesn’t give you immunity if you fail to do anything and let the epidemic take root within. In addition, being a special kind of peninsula country where anyone who crosses your border can be shot without questions helps out big time compared to other peninsulas, hence the emphasis on “an island for all intents and purposes”.
- harimau777 6y ago
  Good point! Perhaps there are factors that allowed those countries to act more like islands than continental nations. Since South Korea's only border is the DMZ I could see them effectively operating like an island. Both Vietnam and Uruguay or to at least some degree peninsulas so perhaps that helped. An (admittedly cursory) look at Vietnam suggests that their major cities are on the coast. Perhaps the jungle separating them from other nations was enough to make them act more like an island? Perhaps we could revise the parent's statement to replace "continental country" with "country with diffuse trade and transportation routes".
bregma 6y ago
At least, that's what the Chinese government's department of information tells us, and we can certainly trust everything they say.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
>It is exponentially harder to contain the virus on continent with hundreds of millions One hell of a claim. The US certainly isn't importing most of its cases.
moltar 6y ago
Vietnam has handled it super well. Not an island.
derptron 6y ago
Anyone who actually believes China magically stopped at 86k cases really need to work on building a healthy level of skepticism.

by empiko 6y ago

Traster 6y ago

The article does a terrible job at addressing nuance. Take Australia - a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m, and Europe - a continent the size of Australia with a population of 750m. Clearly we can compare these like for like and whine about "culture".

viraptor 6y ago
And yet more nuance - the density of major cities in both Europe and Australia are reasonably comparable, so concentrating on those rather than towns / rural / empty areas does provide some information. Sure, the environment will be slightly different and local travel changes things. But most Londoners and most Melbournians don't move that much. (Try to invite someone to zone 5) They'll have mostly-local interactions and similar social activity circles.
friendlybus 6y ago
Australia was setup for this kind of incident either way with strict quarantine rules for decades on natural goods & animals brought into the country. The local wildlife had suffered from invasive species. It was not a hard act to shut it all down. The structure of the schengen area and the differing population densities is an entirely different beast, I agree.
cam_l 6y ago
>a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m You must not have spent much time here. Most Australians live in a narrow band stretched along the south east coast. Victoria, which has just come out of a 4 month lockdown, has nearly 7m residents in about 240 thousand sq km. Slightly smaller, but on par with Sweden. Like Sweden, two thirds of the state is virtually empty. Though in Victoria, we have a much more dense urban centre. The rest of Australia is similar, very small, dense urban centre with vast tracks of unoccupied land. Yes, we can compare these if we are careful about the similarities and differences. Our populated areas have similar densities as various population centres across Europe. Our cities have been cut off from regional areas, and our states closed off from each other, which seems like maybe a bigger deal than if European states closed off from each other. Maybe nuance is hard when you have a point to make.
- Traster 6y ago
  Yes, most of the 25m in Australia live in areas with similar densities as some parts of Europe, that still doesn't mean they're surrounded by several hundred million other people. The problem doesn't scale linearly, policing 750m people isn't like policing 25m people, especially when the 750m have a propensity to all shuffle around a bit, and live in 50 different jurisdictions. My point is that the author isn't careful about the similarities and differences, the author just puts everything down to policy decisions and points of discourse that simply aren't the case in most of the places the author is describing.
  - cam_l 6y ago
    >that simply aren't the case Well, that's the problem with nuance isn't it? If you argue the bigger picture, the facts get in the way. If you argue the minutiae if facts, there is always another scope which renders those facts questionable. As I read it, the article made no comparison of anything with respect to AU/NZ, except that these are other western countries with very different policy decisions. Which is quite careful, and benign, in terms of a comparison to make. If you take the example of Sweden from before, Sweden's border with Norway is about the same length as the border between NSW and VIC, about the same number of people either side, communicable languages, (prob also about the same level of derision from those on either side), a few major airports, a couple of difficult roads out, and the rest is by sea. Though they are closer to more populous areas, we also have a couple of billion people to our north, almost a third of the state are originally from overseas, more than half of them from Asia. There was definitely pressure here to stay open. The majority of Sweden's immigration by comparison is from Middle East. So if you look at policy decisions, in comparison, there is not much reason they were not capable of locking off their borders if they chose, both operationally, and in terms of pressure. In the case of the virus, though failure modes are indeed exponential, success modes seem they might be closer to linear. You raised the 'does not scale' argument, but also tried to say the article lacked nuance. I was just pointing out (though I may not disagree in aggregate), I very much reject the premise of 'does not scale' when trying to deny comparisons. I argue that the article did not lack a nuance which it needed, but point out that your response did, in fact, lack nuance where nuance was needed. 'Does not scale' is a tired argument, and rarely stands to scrutiny. Comparisons are never perfect, but they are all about nuance, where do they work and where do they fail?

makomk 6y ago

China's success is weird. Almost none of what they're doing should work. For example, according to their totally-not-propaganda publication describing how they controlled coronavirus, the foundation is public temperature screening - it's that which feeds potential cases into testing and later contact tracing - and that just fundamentally doesn't work. The false positive and negative rates are atrocious, especially if you do it with forehead thermometers and thermal cameras like they do. They also do big, high-profile testings of entire cities which don't seem to find anything, making them useless. Meanwhile, there kept on being incidents like someone admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms in the main city of the region where the big outbreak was known to be at the time not getting tested for coronavirus and spreading it in the hospital. Or China completely missing an outbreak until it happened to spread to the better-tested and better-protected Beijing. There are some things they do that should have some effect, like treating everyone from Wuhan like a plague carrier very early on in the outbreak (bit late to replicate that now, and China and the WHO loudly campaigned to make sure other countries didn't anyway) and quarantine for people returning to the country. We know from New Zealand though that even dedicated quarantine hotels are too leaky to really work at China scale - and there's also the problem of their extremely long land borders.

dukoid 6y ago
It's nearly free and should enable detecting and tracing emerging clusters before they become a bigger problem.
akvadrako 6y ago
Or China is lying. It's hard to verify the numbers they publish.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'd find it surprising that they hide really big numbers. They probably lower things but it's not high enough to make people want to leak pictures of dead bodies or weird trucks carrying boxes. Or maybe they're really good at hiding their operations..

square_usual 6y ago

> The only continental country that managed to control the virus is China Just off the top of my head, South Korea, Vietnam and Uruguay are "continental" countries that held back COVID really, really well.

oefrha 6y ago
South Korea is a peninsula country, and an island for all intents and purposes considering no one, other than the occasional defector, crosses their only land border (with North Korea). Other examples, sure. There are more, too.
- fidelramos 6y ago
  Spain is a peninsula country, yet the COVID-19 situation is among the worst in the world.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    Being a peninsula country gives you an advantage (relatively fewer border towns to worry about), it doesn’t give you immunity if you fail to do anything and let the epidemic take root within. In addition, being a special kind of peninsula country where anyone who crosses your border can be shot without questions helps out big time compared to other peninsulas, hence the emphasis on “an island for all intents and purposes”.
harimau777 6y ago
Good point! Perhaps there are factors that allowed those countries to act more like islands than continental nations. Since South Korea's only border is the DMZ I could see them effectively operating like an island. Both Vietnam and Uruguay or to at least some degree peninsulas so perhaps that helped. An (admittedly cursory) look at Vietnam suggests that their major cities are on the coast. Perhaps the jungle separating them from other nations was enough to make them act more like an island? Perhaps we could revise the parent's statement to replace "continental country" with "country with diffuse trade and transportation routes".

bregma 6y ago

At least, that's what the Chinese government's department of information tells us, and we can certainly trust everything they say.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

>It is exponentially harder to contain the virus on continent with hundreds of millions One hell of a claim. The US certainly isn't importing most of its cases.

moltar 6y ago

Vietnam has handled it super well. Not an island.

derptron 6y ago

Anyone who actually believes China magically stopped at 86k cases really need to work on building a healthy level of skepticism.